As more businesses use the Internet to conduct business, securing and ensuring transactions become critical to the operation of the business.  One promising technology for authenticating transactions is the public key encryption system and digital certificates.  However, use of the public key encryption system and digital certificates depend on the secure distribution and availability of public keys.  We describe a secure and highly available architecture based on biological models for the distribution of public keys.

Basic functionality:

An electronic commerce transaction using public key encryption basically proceeds as follows:

• A customer authorizes payment by encrypting a form with his private key.
  
• The merchant contacts a public key server to obtain the customer's public key.
  
• If the public key decrypts the signed form, then the signature and identity of the customer is verified.